The staff has to deal with a possible hearing involving Leo, a sex-education bill, funding for PBS-TV and the source of some news leaks.

From NBC:

While President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his staff debate the appropriate response to a controversial new sex education study, there are fears that the parents of a murdered gay teenager should be excused from attending the signing of a hate crimes bill because of the father's embarrassment about his son's homosexuality. Josh (Bradley Whitford) and Sam (Rob Lowe) meet with an appropriations subcommittee which is investigating Josh's lack of cooperation in the White House staff drug probe -- all of which is designed to expose Leo's (John Spencer) former substance-abuse problem. Toby (Richard Schiff) relishes his verbal duel with some congressmen who have held up the newest appointments for the Public Broadcasting Corporation. C.J. (Allison Janney) is advised to save a few embarrassing stories for release on Friday to blunt the effect on the media over the weekend, but she also finds time to continue her frisky flirtation with a White House reporter (Timothy Busfield).

It's an international trade dispute that lawyers and diplomats have spent nearly a decade trying to fully understand, yet alone resolve. But two actors on NBC's hit series West Wing summed up the dispute nicely in a January episode.

The squabble over European banana quotas has cost Cincinnati's Chiquita Brands International $1.4 billion over the last decade. Two weeks ago, Time magazine devoted nine pages to Chairman Carl Lindner's political contributions and their impact on the U.S. decision to impose trade sanctions.

On the show, actor John Spencer, playing Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, explained the situation to President Josiah Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, on a walk into the Oval Office. The problem, Mr. Spencer said accurately, is that the quotas take business away from bananas produced in poor Latin American countries.

...

The president immediately seized the bottom line: "So I'm in trouble with Chiquita and Dole?"

Yep.

"Bananas according to TV"
by Cliff Peale
February 13, 2000
Cincinnati Enquirer

Obscure news clips stir the pot. A small town in Alabama wants to scrap all laws except the Ten Commandments -- how are they going to enforce the "covet thy neighbor's wife" part?

"The Real White House"
by Matthew Miller
March 2000
Brill's Content

"This woman came up to me and said, 'You know what? You must not hire that woman back. If she did this, she will be doing it again,'" ...

"I was so taken with this woman worrying about me. She thought I was being a little too optimistic about the second chance he gave her. But Leo is a man who's been given a second chance himself."
- John Spencer

"Passion for politics"
by Virginia Rohan
March 8, 2000
Bergen Record

Again, I just think that as many gay stories as we've done, like gays in the military and the Matthew Shepard story that we did early last year - [the crime on the show was] followed by his parents coming to town for the hate-crimes bill signing. And [press secretary] C.J. [Cregg, played by Allison Janney] has assumed that the father is very quiet and uncomfortable about this because he's embarrassed that his son is gay - when in fact he is so fumingly pissed at the president for his chickenshit attitude on gay rights in this country that he simply can't bring himself to be at this bill signing.
- Aaron Sorkin

"A Few Good Stories"
by Paris Barclay
February 13, 2001
The Advocate

But John Spencer of The West Wing does -- and he's glad the first season of that show is on DVD.

"We were out there, we didn't know how we would be received, but we thought we were doing something very special," he said. "We called that 'the season in the trenches.' To have that sort of immortalized and to revisit it" is a good thing, he said.

Sets he has bought include British productions like Upstairs Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown, "which is in my eyes some of the most perfect television there ever was."

No American shows? "Not yet," he said. "I would be interested in buying L.A. Law because I was part of that journey. Certainly Hill Street (Blues), which was the first kind of great ensemble drama. We exist in a way because of Hill Street."